Re: 2.4.20 instability on bigmem systems?

[William Lee Irwin III]

On Sun, Mar 16, 2003 at 06:15:11PM -0800, Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade wrote:
> Okay, I tried to load the system a bit and stress out the disk I/O, running 
> a couple finds across the whole system (find | xargs stat, find | xargs cat 
> > /dev/null, a couple other things) after sucking up free memory by catting 
> our database disk files to /dev/null.  I also had a 'make -j5 clean 
> oldconfig dep bzImage modules' running to try to drive the load up a bit, 
> too.
> I've got snapshots of meminfo, slabinfo, and output from 'ps auxfww' at:
> http://castandcrew.com/~gregory/lkmlstuff/burpr/2.4.20/loadtest/
> It only really starts getting interesting after 20030316.1725, when I 
> started the kernel build.  I have a very simple shell script that basically 
> does nothing other than "make clean oldconfig dep && make -j5 bzImage && 
> make -j5 modules".  I ran that a couple times in the sources for Red Hat's 
> 2.4.9-e.12 kernel sources.
> Surprisingly I wasn't able to grind down the system like I expected.  Not 
> sure why it's behaving so wonderfully today.

If it didn't behave badly then it won't help to look at the stats.

-- wli